Archie McNair, the entrepreneur who made the King’s Road swing, has died, aged 95. In the Guardian’s obituary, Veronica Horwell describes what the road and its neighbourhood were like in the early 1950s, when McNair moved in:
Deep Chelsea still felt like the London artists’ bohemia it had been for a century. Locals toddled in their slippers to buy their daily bread from Mr Beaton’s Victorian bakery...[McNair] set up a photographic studio at number 128 King’s Road, with a team including Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon), and opened the Fantasie, London’s first espresso bar outside Soho, on its ground floor. He knew half his neighbourhood, including a wild young couple, Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene (known as APG), lately let loose from Goldsmiths art college, and helped them invent Bazaar, her fashion boutique at 138a.
There rest was history, mini-skirts and hot pants. The Look At Life film below reminds us that not all of the King’s Road was swinging even quite deep into the Sixties. But those who were did add, as the waspish voice-over concedes, “A not unpleasing splash of colour in the old city.” Savour that “old”.
Could the dancing really have been that good...?
